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Chronicle of a Death Foretold Paperback – October 7, 2003
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A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion.
- Print length128 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 7, 2003
- Dimensions5.16 x 0.34 x 7.95 inches
- ISBN-109781400034710
- ISBN-13978-1400034710
- Lexile measure1210L
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Many of those who were on the docks knew that they were going to kill Santiago Nasar.Highlighted by 490 Kindle readers
The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married. They knew how to do screen embroidery, sew by machine, weave bone lace, wash and iron, make artificial flowers and fancy candy, and write engagement announcements.Highlighted by 421 Kindle readers
The death of his father had forced him to abandon his studies at the end of secondary school in order to take charge of the family ranch. By his nature, Santiago Nasar was merry and peaceful, and openhearted.Highlighted by 335 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This investigation of an ancient murder takes on the quality of a hallucinatory exploration, a deep, groping search into the gathering darkness of human intentions for a truth that continually slithers away.” —The New York Review of Books
“Brilliant ... A small masterpiece ... we can almost see, smell and hear Garcia Marquez’s Caribbean backwater and its inhabitants.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“As pungent and memorable as a sharp spice, an examination of the nature of complicity and fate ... an exquisite performance.” —The Christian Science Monitor
"A tour de force ... In prose that is spare yet heavy with meaning, Garcia Marquez gives us not merely a chronicle but a portrait of the town and its collective psyche ... not merely a family but an entire culture.” —The Washington Post Book World
From the Inside Flap
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers?is put on trial.
From the Back Cover
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers--is put on trial.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Nor did Santiago Nasar recognize the omen. He had slept little and poorly, without getting undressed, and he woke up with a headache and a sediment of copper stirrup on his palate, and he interpreted them as the natural havoc of the wedding revels that had gone on until after midnight. Furthermore: all the many people he ran into after leaving his house at five minutes past six and until he was carved up like a pig an hour later remembered him as being a little sleepy but in a good mood, and he remarked to all of them in a casual way that it was a very beautiful day. No one was certain if he was referring to the state of the weather. Many people coincided in recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze coming in through the banana groves, as was to be expected in a fine February of that period. But most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters, and that at the moment of the misfortune a thin drizzle was falling like the one Santiago Nasar had seen in his dream grove. I was recovering from the wedding revels in the apostolic lap of Mariá Alejandrina Cervantes, and I only awakened with the clamor of the alarm bells, thinking they had turned them loose in honor of the bishop.
Santiago Nasar put on a shirt and pants of white linen, both items unstarched, just like the ones he'd put on the day before for the wedding. It was his attire for special occasions. If it hadn't been for the bishop's arrival, he would have dressed in his khaki outfit and the riding boots he wore on Mondays to go to The Divine Face, the cattle ranch he'd inherited from his father and which he administered with very good judgment but without much luck. In the country he wore a .357 Magnum on his belt, and its armored bullets, according to what he said, could cut a horse in two through the middle. During the partridge season he would also carry his falconry equipment. In the closet he kept a Mannlicher Schoenauer .30-06 rifle, a .300 Holland & Holland Magnum rifle, a .22 Hornet with a double-powered telescopic sight, and a Winchester repeater. He always slept the way his father had slept, with the weapon hidden in the pillowcase, but before leaving the house that day he took out the bullets and put them in the drawer of the night table. "He never left it loaded," his mother told me. I knew that, and I also knew that he kept the guns in one place and hid the ammunition in another far removed so that nobody, not even casually, would yield to the temptation of loading them inside the house. It was a wise custom established by his father ever since one morning when a servant girl had shaken the case to get the pillow out and the pistol went off as it hit the floor and the bullet wrecked the cupboard in the room, went through the living room wall, passed through the dining room of the house next door with the thunder of war, and turned a life-size saint on the main altar of the church on the opposite side of the square to plaster dust. Santiago Nasar, who was a young child at the time, never forgot the lesson of that accident.
The last image his mother had of him was of his fleeting passage through the bedroom. He'd wakened her while he was feeling around trying to find an aspirin in the bathroom medicine chest, and she turned on the light and saw him appear in the doorway with a glass of water in his hand. So she would remember him forever. Santiago Nasar told her then about the dream, but she didn't pay any great attention to the trees.
"Any dream about birds means good health," she said.
She had watched him from the same hammock and in the same position in which I found her prostrated by the last lights of old age when I returned to this forgotten village, trying to put the broken mirror of memory back together from so many scattered shards. She could barely make out shapes in full light and had some medicinal leaves on her temples for the eternal headache that her son had left her the last time he went through the bedroom. She was on her side, clutching the cords at the head of the hammock as she tried to get up, and there in the half shadows was the baptistry smell that had startled me on the morning of the crime.
No sooner had I appeared on the threshold than she confused me with the memory of Santiago Nasar. "There he was," she told me. "He was dressed in white linen that had been washed in plain water because his skin was so delicate that it couldn't stand the noise of starch." She sat in the hammock for a long time, chewing pepper cress seeds, until the illusion that her son had returned left her. Then she sighed: "He was the man in my life."
I saw him in her memory. He had turned twenty-one the last week in January, and he was slim and pale and had his father's Arab eyelids and curly hair. He was the only child of a marriage of convenience without a single moment of happiness, but he seemed happy with his father until the latter died suddenly, three years before, and he continued seeming to be so with his solitary mother until the Monday of his death. From her he had inherited a sixth sense. From his father he learned at a very early age the manipulation of firearms, his love for horses, and the mastery of high-flying birds of prey, but from him he also learned the good arts of valor and prudence. They spoke Arabic between themselves, but not in front of Plácida Linero, so that she wouldn't feel excluded. They were never seen armed in town, and the only time they brought in their trained birds was for a demonstration of falconry at a charity bazaar. The death of his father had forced him to abandon his studies at the end of secondary school in order to take charge of the family ranch. By his nature, Santiago Nasar was merry and peaceful, and openhearted.
On the day they were going to kill him, his mother thought he'd got his days mixed up when she saw him dressed in white. "I reminded him that it was Monday," she told me. But he explained to her that he'd got dressed up pontifical style in case he had a chance to kiss the bishop's ring. She showed no sign of interest. "He won't even get off the boat," she told him. "He'll give an obligatory blessing, as always, and go back the way he came. He hates this town."
Santiago Nasar knew it was true, but church pomp had an irresistible fascination for him. "It's like the movies," he'd told me once. The only thing that interested his mother about the bishop's arrival, on the other hand, was for her son not to get soaked in the rain, since she'd heard him sneeze while he was sleeping. She advised him to take along an umbrella, but he waved good-bye and left the room. It was the last time she saw him.
Victoria Guzmán, the cook, was sure that it hadn't rained that day, or during the whole month of February. "On the contrary," she told me when I came to see her, a short time before her death. "The sun warms things up earlier than in August." She had been quartering three rabbits for lunch, surrounded by panting dogs, when Santiago Nasar entered the kitchen. "He always got up with the face of a bad night," Victoria Guzmán recalled without affection. Divina Flor, her daughter, who was just coming into bloom, served Santiago Nasar a mug of mountain coffee with a shot of cane liquor, as on every Monday, to help him bear the burden of the night before. The enormous kitchen, with the whispers from the fire and the hens sleeping on their perches, was breathing stealthily. Santiago Nasar swallowed another aspirin and sat down to drink the mug of coffee in slow sips, thinking just as slowly, without taking his eyes off the two women who were disemboweling the rabbits on the stove. In spite of her age, Victoria Guzmán was still in good shape. The girl, as yet a bit untamed, seemed overwhelmed by the drive of her glands. Santiago Nasar grabbed her by the wrist when she came to take the empty mug from him.
"The time has come for you to be tamed," he told her.
Victoria Guzmán showed him the bloody knife.
"Let go of her, white man," she ordered him seriously. "You won't have a drink of that water as long as I'm alive."
She'd been seduced by Ibrahim Nasar in the fullness of her adolescence. She'd made love to him in secret for several years in the stables of the ranch, and he brought her to be a house servant when the affection was over. Divina Flor, who was the daughter of a more recent mate, knew that she was destined for Santiago Nasar's furtive bed, and that idea brought out a premature anxiety in her. "Another man like that hasn't ever been born again," she told me, fat and faded and surrounded by the children of other loves. "He was just like his father," Victoria Guzmán answered her. "A shit." But she couldn't avoid a wave of fright as she remembered Santiago Nasar's horror when she pulled out the insides of a rabbit by the roots and threw the steaming guts to the dogs.
"Don't be a savage," he told her. "Make believe it was a human being."
Victoria Guzman needed almost twenty years to understand that a man accustomed to killing defenseless animals could suddenly express such horror. "Good heavens," she explained with surprise. "All that was such a revelation." Nevertheless, she had so much repressed rage the morning of the crime that she went on feeding the dogs with the insides of the other rabbits, just to embitter Santiago Nasar's breakfast. That's what they were up to when the whole town awoke with the earthshaking bellow of the bishop's steamboat.
The house was a former warehouse, with two stories, walls of rough planks, and a peaked tin roof where the buzzards kept watch over the garbage on the docks. It had been built in the days when the river was so usable that many seagoing barges and even a few tall ships made their way up there through the marshes of the estuary. By the time Ibrahim Nasar arrived with the last Arabs at the end of the civil wars, seagoing ships no longer came there because of shifts in the river, and the warehouse was in disuse. Ibrahim Nasar bought it at a cheap price in order to set up an import store that he never did establish, and only when he was going to be married did he convert it into a house to live in. On the ground floor he opened up a parlor that served for everything, and in back he built a stable for four animals, the servants' quarters, and a country kitchen with windows opening onto the dock, through which the stench of the water came in at all hours. The only thing he left intact in the parlor was the spiral staircase rescued from some shipwreck. On the upper floor, where the customs offices had been before, he built two large bedrooms and five cubbyholes for the many children he intended having, and he constructed a wooden balcony that overlooked the almond trees on the square, where Plácida Linero would sit on March afternoons to console herself for her solitude. In the front he kept the main door and built two full-length windows with lathe-turned bars. He also kept the rear door, except a bit taller so that a horse could enter through it, and he kept a part of the old pier in use. That was always the door most used, not only because it was the natural entry to the mangers and the kitchen, but because it opened onto the street that led to the new docks without going through the square. The front door, except for festive occasions, remained closed and barred. Nevertheless, it was there, and not at the rear door, that the men who were going to kill him waited for Santiago Nasar, and it was through there that he went out to receive the bishop, despite the fact that he would have to walk completely around the house in order to reach the docks.
No one could understand such fatal coincidences. The investigating judge who came from Riohacha must have sensed them without daring to admit it, for his impulse to give them a rational explanation was obvious in his report. The door to the square was cited several times with a dime-novel title: "The Fatal Door." In reality, the only valid explanation seemed to be that of Plácida Linero, who answered the question with her mother wisdom: "My son never went out the back door when he was dressed up." It seemed to be such an easy truth that the investigator wrote it down as a marginal note, but he didn't include it in the report.
Victoria Guzmán, for her part, had been categorical with her answer that neither she nor her daughter knew that the men were waiting for Santiago Nasar to kill him. But in the course of her years she admitted that both knew it when he came into the kitchen to have his coffee. They had been told it by a woman who had passed by after five o'clock to beg a bit of milk, and who in addition had revealed the motives and the place where they were waiting. "I didn't warn him because I thought it was drunkards' talk," she told me. Nevertheless, Divina Flor confessed to me on a later visit, after her mother had died, that the latter hadn't said anything to Santiago Nasar because in the depths of her heart she wanted them to kill him. She, on the other hand, didn't warn him because she was nothing but a frightened child at the time, incapable of a decision of her own, and she'd been all the more frightened when he grabbed her by the wrist with a hand that felt frozen and stony, like the hand of a dead man.
Product details
- ASIN : 140003471X
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (October 7, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 128 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781400034710
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400034710
- Lexile measure : 1210L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.16 x 0.34 x 7.95 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,663 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #109 in Magical Realism
- #138 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #1,340 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a prominent literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English.
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Customers find the book fantastic, enjoyable, and good from start to finish. They describe the story as dense and deep. Readers praise the writing style as beautiful, efficient, and descriptive. They mention the book is short and can be finished in a few hours. In addition, they appreciate the pacing as well-paced and gripping.
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Customers find the book fantastic, interesting, and enjoyable. They say it's good from start to finish and a brilliant classic. Readers also mention the book is entertaining with its many layers.
"...This is highly entertaining and enjoyable reading and is strongly recommended." Read more
"...Although this was a fascinating read, I can't help but to think that some on its meaning was twisted in the translation, and if read in its original..." Read more
"Very good book I was entertained while reading it greatly...." Read more
"...can read other reviews for content and spoilers, but this is one of the finest novels of the 20th century...." Read more
Customers find the story very dense and deep. They say the book has many twists and turns throughout. Readers also mention it's a fantastic read into the human psyche and fills them with wonder.
"...The story sounds simple and it is revealed in the first pages of the novel...." Read more
"...with this New York Times Book Review: "Exquisitely harrowing...very strange and brilliantly conceived...A sort of metaphysical murder mystery."" Read more
"...The gist of the story was the same but the sequence was not what I remembered. Go figure." Read more
"...This involvement of the reader is one thing that made the novel very interesting to me...." Read more
Customers find the writing style beautiful, efficient, and captivating. They also appreciate the descriptive words and the author's brilliant conceit. Readers mention the book is an easy read that captures contextual subtleties.
"...Times Book Review: "Exquisitely harrowing...very strange and brilliantly conceived...A sort of metaphysical murder mystery."" Read more
"...The style of the novella is simple but imaginative, elegant and brilliant in the details. Every sentence is carefully crafted...." Read more
"...I really got interested in this story was because the author uses descriptive words to show how Santiago, one of the main characters, is killed...." Read more
"...I read this 30 years ago and again last week. Beautiful writing, quite non-linear, and well translated." Read more
Customers find the book short, saying it's perfect for the story.
"...The length of the book is short but perfect for the story that needs telling...." Read more
"...It is extremely hard to describe this novel. It is short, complex, disturbing, confusing...." Read more
"This is a short, incredibly tight novel from one of the greatest authors of the last century...." Read more
"...But I did not find “Chronicle of a death” engaging. It’s a very short novel (110 pages) so I decided not to give up on it midway, but having read it..." Read more
Customers find the book well-paced, saying it can be finished in a few hours. They also say it's a gripping tragedy story.
"...The book is a rather short read and can be finished in a few hours...." Read more
"Take the time to read Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez, a Nobel Prize winner. Quick read, very efficient writing, and you need to pay attention to characters..." Read more
"...It is quite sad that is based closely on true events." Read more
"...Its a relatively short book, and the writting style is simple and a quick read. However, the story itself is verry simbolic and deep." Read more
Customers find the book thought-provoking, interesting, and scholarly. They appreciate the multiple points of view.
"...Instead I received, and enjoyed a very scholarly analysis of Garcia Marquez's book I had read originally when first published...." Read more
"...entertaining with its many layers, many people involved and thought provoking subject. Certainly written by a master of his craft...." Read more
"Multiple points of view. Characters explain their actions but all fail in their intentions of lack of intentions...." Read more
"As with all of Marquez's writings, this one is just as thought-provoking, and fills one with wonder - of the human spirit, of the very reasoning of..." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book to be well-developed. They also appreciate the humor, passion, and compassion.
"...is able to relate this short tale with humor, passion and compassion as the characters, trapped in their social roles, move toward their destinies...." Read more
"...There are many characters in the book. Everybody in the town seemed to be involved in some way...." Read more
"...I liked this book because it shows how the characters evolve all throughout the story...." Read more
"...Beautifully captures contextual subtleties and builds characters well...." Read more
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Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2011
The story line is an age old drama of defending family honor. A young beauty, Angela Vicario, protected by her dominant over-bearing mother, marries a young rich man, Bayardo San Roman, but is returned to her home on her wedding night when Bayardo discovers his bride is not a virgin. Angela names a handsome 21 year old Arab playboy, Santiago Nasar, as the man who took her virginity and now her twin brothers, Pedro and Pablo, must do the honorable thing and kill Santiago to restore family honor. The story sounds simple and it is revealed in the first pages of the novel. Thus the amusing aspect of the novel is how an entire town conspires at an unconscious and sometimes conscious level not to warn Santiago or to stop the Vicario twins.
Each character in the story shed some new light on the Nasar family, the San Roman family, or the Vicario family. Yet each character also, through a comedy of errors fails to warn Santiago or fails to stop the Vicario twins. Some characters like Victoria Guzman, the Nasar family cook, has reasons she wishes Santiago was dead, but others are just negligent in not warning the man when they have a chance. Marquez leaves us with the delightful puzzle for each town member whether they are guilty by omission or by commission. It is the skill of Marquez that the story is full of old peasant tales and details that move the narrative forward to the foretold conclusion. The fact that Pedro and Pablo kill pigs for a living adds to the grisly details of the murder once it happens. Honor and the appearance of honor also play a role in the entire narratives. Old women tell young girls how to fake virginity with a new husband while young men kill each other over loss of family honor. The men appear to dominate but the women have most of the cards in this society.
Peasants are direct and Marquez is just as direct as he gives us all the gory details of the murder. This ability to speak from the perspective of the village folk is certainly a wonderful skill. The length of the book is short but perfect for the story that needs telling. This is highly entertaining and enjoyable reading and is strongly recommended.
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2008
The narrator tries to recreate the events that led to the brutal killing of Santiago Nasar 27 years ago. The story reads like a mystery, but from the beginning, you know Santiago is going to be killed, so it is not so much a mystery as it is a puzzle. The only surprise at the end of the book was that I somehow really liked it. I agree with this New York Times Book Review: "Exquisitely harrowing...very strange and brilliantly conceived...A sort of metaphysical murder mystery."
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2016
Along the way as the murder plot is outlined Marquez captures the absurd aspects of everyday life in the town. Although this story is about a tragic and indelible day in the life of a small community; our attention is frequently drawn to details that may seem unnecessary at first, but crucial later on. Given the length of the story, Marquez has little room to play around with character development, instead he provides small anecdotes and brief but vivid sketches of townspeople.
This book belongs to the magical realism genre. Magical realism novels include events that appear are normal in real life, but they are so ridiculously improbable of actually happening that they are "magical." The line between normal, fantasy and reality gets blurred. In this case everybody knows a murder is going to be committed but they don’t stop it. For each person there seems a normal reason for his or her inaction. You then end up with a situation where improbable events become common and the usual becomes rare.
The style of the novella is simple but imaginative, elegant and brilliant in the details. Every sentence is carefully crafted.
Many strange and ironical things happened that day. The role of Santiago’s mother in barring his escape route is especially so. Earlier Santiago Nasar watched a servant butcher rabbits for lunch, ''surrounded by panting dogs.'' He is soon similarly butchered, and the same dogs arrive at his autopsy, panting, ravenous, eager to be fed his bowels as they were fed the rabbits.
There are a lot of unanswered questions in the chronicle.
Who exactly was the husband Bayardo San Roman? Why did he come to town in the first place? Was he the Devil or a Homosexual? What did he do before he came to town? He certainly was a strange and interesting character, his answers to questions disguised the truth, why did he marry Angela, why did he give her back and why did he return?
Was Santiago Nasar the one responsible for Angela losing her virginity? The investigator could not find any evidence to suggest he was except Angela’s blank statement that he was responsible. There was a lot of evidence to the contrary; such as they were never seen together, they frequented different social groups and so on.
What really happened that day? The narrator can’t put the facts together in his mind even though he was there. He relies on the memories of others 27 years later and they can’t remember either. Memories are often tainted by what people would have liked to happen, a story that puts them in a good light especially to themselves. Even the narrator who was involved may not be telling the full truth. The wife Angela also seems a very unreliable witness.
Why didn’t someone warn Santiago or even better stop the murder? There were a few half-hearted efforts by the Mayor on others. Many people knew but did not warn the victim.
Santiago Nasar is portrayed as something of a Christ like figure. When he found out what was going to happen he seemed surprised but acted as if he accepted his fate.
The reader has to fill in the answers himself to these questions. This involvement of the reader is one thing that made the novel very interesting to me. Readers with different beliefs, prejudices or experiences will come to different conclusions. In my case I see a story without an objective reality or set of facts. What happened is what each person saw, believed and remembers. Others will see a strong religious significance in Santiago sacrificing himself like Christ.
There are many characters in the book. Everybody in the town seemed to be involved in some way. It reminds me of the small country town I grew up in NSW. The following is a list I compiled to keep track on them roughly in order of their appearance;
1. Santiago Nasar the victim who was murdered
2. The Bishop who visited the town but only blessed from a distance, did not land because he hated the place
3. Cristo Bedoya Santiago’s closest friend, who searched for Santiago in his dying moments.
4. Placida Linero, Santiago Nasar’s mother who contributed to his death by barring the door.
5. Narrator, friend of Santiago who was with him all the time at the day of the wedding, along with his brother and Cristo Bedoya at the church and at the festival.
6. Maria Alejandrina Cervantes, some sort of madam, on whose lap the narrator was recovering on the morning of the murder
7. Victoria Guzman, Santiago and his mother’s cook who butchered a rabbit on the day of the murder in a similar way to that Santiago was butchered.
8. Divina Flor, Victoria’s daughter who was just coming into bloom and who was grabbed by the pussy by Santiago on the morning of the murder.
9. Ibrahim Nasar, Santiago’s father, who had seduced Victoria Guzman.
10. Someone, unknown, who pushed a note under the door warning Santiago that his life was in danger.
11. Clotilde Armenta, Proprietress of Milk Shop in town square who was the first to see Santiago in the glow of dawn and thought he already “looked like a ghost”
12. Pedro and Pablo Vicario, twins who murdered Santiago.
13. Margo, Narrator’s sister who described the Bishop’s visit and described Santiago as being in good spirits at the Wharf
14. Cristo Bedoya, a member of group of four close friends including Santiago, the narrator and the narrator’s brother . He calculated the cost of the wedding with Santiago.
15. Flora Miguel Santiago’s fiancé
16. Don Lazaro Aponte, a Colonel and ex town Mayor in retirement, who was told by policeman of twins intentions at 4am Monday
17. Father Carmen Amador, town priest
18. Narrator and Margo’s mother, Luisa Santiaga, housebound but knew everything that was going on in the town.
19. Angela Vicario, bride that was returned to her mother by her husband because she was not a virgin
20. Pura Vicario, mother of returned bride
21. Narrator’s father
22. Narrator’s brother Jaime
23. Bayardo San Roman the man who gave back his bride and reminded the narrator’s mother of the devil
24. Magdalena Oliver who arrived with Bayardo on the boat 6 months before the wedding but couldn’t take her eyes off him
25. Poncio Vicario blind father of the bride
26. Bayardo’s family mother father and two provocative sisters
27. Alberta Symonds Bayardo’s mother a mulatto from Curacao
28. General Petronio San Roman impressive hero of civil wars
29. Widower Xuis – previous owner of house Bayardo bought for himself and his bride
30. Dr Dionisio Iguaran doctor who played dominos with Xuis.
31. Angela’s friends who advised her on how to handle the situation of her not being a virgin.
32. Narrator’s sister the nun who danced a merengue in her habit at the wedding.
33. Mercedes Barcha, who narrator proposed to in primary school and married 14 years later.
34. Faustino Santos, a butcher friend who sharpened the twin’s knives.
35. Other butchers who saw the twins early Monday
36. Leandro Pornoy, policeman who Faustino Santos told of the twin’s intentions. He passed the message onto Colonel Don Lazaro Aponte.
37. Don Rogelio De La Flor husband of Clotilde Armenta Proprietress of milk shop
38. Beggar woman who comes each day to ask for milk took a message to Victoria Guzman from Clotilde Armenta.
39. Hortensia Baute who saw twins passing by her house with their knives and thought “they had already killed him”
40. Prudencia Cotes, Pablo’s fiancée and her mother. Prudencia said that shoe would not have married Pablo if he did not commit the act.
41. Fake customers buying milk they didn’t need to see if the murder was really going to happen.
42. Susana Abdala Centenary Matriarch of Arab community provided medical help to twins.
43. Aura Villeros, midwife who suffered from bladder problems from the day of the murder.
44. Investigating Magistrate, new graduate whose report ended up in flood-ridden basement, which was Sir Francis Drake’s headquarters for 2 days. He found no indication that Santiago had been the cause of the wrong.
45. Polo Carrillo owner of electric plant who said Santiago thought his wealth made him untouchable. His wife Fausta Lopez commented “Like all Turks”
46. Indalecio Pardo, friend of Santiago who lost his nerve rather than warning him.
47. Ecolastica Cisneros who saw Santiago and his friend walking calmly in the square discussing the cost of the wedding
48. Sara Noriega shoe store owner who Santiago told not to worry about his paleness
49. Celeste Dangond who was sitting in his pyjamas in front of his house mocking those who were going to see the Bishop.
50. Yamil Shaium who waited at his dry goods store to meet Santiago and warn him.


